And while “saved our startup” may seem dramatic, it really isn’t.
Each of these books has a significant impact on how we approached
a key area of our startup.

I honestly don’t think Yipit would be where we are today had we not
learned their lessons:

Never Eat Alone – I used to hole myself up
in my apartment thinking that an hour spent working was always
better than an hour spent meeting someone else. This book
convinced me I was wrong. I started getting coffees, breakfast
and dinners with other founders and potential investors and I
was consistently amazed by how much a single 30-minute
conversation could cause us to completely re-evaluate our
strategies.

Influence: The Psychology of
Persuasion - So much of startups is getting your users
to take certain actions. Getting them to sign-up, share a link,
try out a product, etc. Constantly improving the conversion
rates of each of these actions is at the core of what most
startups do. This book laid out 7 key principles that will help
you increase those conversions. Once I read this, I started
seeing how every successful company uses them. These principles
don’t replace a good product, but they can make it so that more
people give your product a chance.

Getting Real – Like most other first-time
founders, I could get lost in all the potential problems and
corner cases our product would struggle with. This book taught
me to ignore that instinct. A passage that really struck home
with me was that 37Signals launched BaseCamp without billing
because they figured they had 30 days to get billing done.
While it seemed insane, it both allowed them to focus on
problems they currently had and forced them to build a very
simple billing system.

The Lean Startup – I think of our startup’s
journey as pre- and post- learning about the Lean Startup
movement. It completely changed how we approached our startup
and I owe much of our success to its teachings. Plus, not only
did it help us when we were getting off the ground, it’s
helping us today as we apply the strategy to new products at
Yipit.

Don’t Make Me Think – This is an old book,
even when I read it four years ago, but it really taught me to
put myself in the shoes of our users. It taught me that if the
user can’t figure something out, it’s my fault not their fault.
It taught me about simplicity and calls to action and re-using
existing user interface design patterns.

Django
Book - I’m not sure this is still the best way to
learn Django anymore. But, when I decided to teach myself to
code, this online book showed me how easy it could be to build
web prototypes. I couldn’t believe how powerful a framework
Django was and, within months, we were building and launching
our own prototypes. This was the single biggest step-function
change for our startup.

And, while you may think that reading a whole book about these
concepts may not be a good use of your time, keep in mind that
the challenge isn’t just finding out about these concepts but
absorbing them.

Sometimes you just have to read 100+ pages to finally
stop stubbornly following your misguided instincts, I had
to.